PHY-Layer Cover-Free Coding for Wireless Pilot Authentication in IoV Communications: Protocol Design and Ultra-Security Proof

Wireless channel state information (CSI) from intelligent vehicles to the roadside unit (RSU) is a must for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications in Internet of Vehicles, but easily suffers the risks of being attacked due to the publicly known and deterministic characteristic of PHY-layer pilots that are employed for CSI acquisition. This incurs the issue of wireless pilot authentication (WPA), that is, verifying the authenticity of pilots and claimed CSIs. In this paper, we, for multiantenna V2I orthogonal frequency division multiplexed communications, develop a PHY-layer cover-free (PHY-CF) coding theory to build up a secure WPA (SWPA) protocol. Here, we encode and convey vehicle pilot signals into diversified subcarrier activation patterns (SAPs) on the time-frequency domain by employing cover-free coding. We redesign the decoding procedure using the signal independence characteristic such that those encoded SAPs, though camouflaged by malicious signals and superimposed onto each other in wireless environment, could be separated, identified and decoded into the original pilots securely. For this protocol, we prove that perfect pilot conveying and separation could be both guaranteed. We formulate the pilot identification error probability (IEP) and show how PHY-CF coding could help position the location of attacker and reduce IEP to further achieve ultrasecurity. Considering 20 MHz long-term evolution bandwidth, we prove that the number of co-time co-frequency vehicles that are securely authenticated achieves up to 19\,\,{\times }\,\, {X} for X serving sectors of base station type RSU and the latency time of uplink data access is up to 1.5 ms, thus furthering the autonomous driving. Computer simulations comprehensively verify those benefits of proposed SWPA protocol.